Expected more

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

THE CHAIRMAN is an acceptable spy thriller of the late '60s, chiefly of interest for featuring a Western look at Mao-dominated communist China of the era. The story is slim and sees Gregory Peck jetting off to China to capture the usual MacGuffin, which is the formula for an enzyme which can dramatically increase farming yields. It's rather long-winded, with too many cutbacks to the guys at base who commentate and slow down the action, but the depiction of China is engaging and the presence of Mao himself in the character list makes this fun. Peck is reliably good, as ever, and there are plenty of familiar faces in the forms of Keye Luke, Ric Young, Burt Kwouk, Zienia Merton, and a cameoing Anne Heywood.

Location footage in late-1960s Hong Kong highlights this espionage yarn with sci-fi overtones in which scientist Gregory Peck is persuaded to go to China in search of a revolutionary crop additive that can prevent famine. The technological gimmick has Peck outfitted with a tiny radio that allows him to be a mobile human bug and transmit everything he hears to an intelligence arm of the CIA and MI6 based in London. The movie feels like a big-budget version of a "Time Tunnel" episode -- minus the time travel.I've always thought that this film inspired the short-lived NBC series "Search."

The Chairman (GB title: The Most Dangerous Man In The World) is a typically twisty 60s spy thriller. It feels like a low-key James Bond adventure with a hint of The Man From UNCLE stirred in. Gregory Peck is the hero in this one, but in spite of his star charisma and the fact that the film has a fairly intriguing plot, it still emerges an overall disappointment. Something in the handling just doesn't quite add up – maybe it's the way the film twists itself into semi-confusion, maybe it's the clumsy post-production editing which sticks out like a sore thumb, or maybe it's the fact that the sillier aspects of the storyline never quite convince as fully as they're meant to. Whatever the reason, The Chairman falls short of its potential.Dr. John Hathaway (Gregory Peck) is recruited by the CIA for a tricky undercover assignment in Red China. It seems the Chinese have almost perfected an agricultural enzyme that could allow crops to grow in hostile environments like mountains and deserts. Such an enzyme would allow China to gain absolute control of the world's mass food production market. Hathaway is a close friend of the man who invented the enzyme, revered Chinese professor Soong Li (Keye Luke). He is also considered by the Chinese as the one man who can help them to add the finishing touches to the formula. This is great news for the CIA, who need someone they can send into China to get close to those involved in the production of the enzyme without arousing suspicion. Hathaway agrees to do the job for them, and a microchip transmitter is implanted into his head which is capable of visually and aurally relaying everything he witnesses during his time in China. What Marshal Shelby (Arthur Hill) of the CIA doesn't tell Hathaway is that the transmitter in his brain is also wired up to a small explosive device, so that if the mission looks destined to fail – or if it looks like he might fall into enemy hands – his head can be blown off at any time simply by pushing a button! The best thing about the film is Jerry Goldsmith's rousing music score, which adds excitement to scenes that actually, on most occasions, aren't very exciting. In spite of the fact that Peck is in continuous danger virtually every moment that he's in China, the film somehow slackens the suspense when it should be tightening it. Long periods of the film are tedious and uninvolving. Peck gives a passable performance as the unsuspecting "walking bomb", even though he's not really the right actor for the role, while Arthur Hill's eye-patched official overseeing the operation might have stepped right out of a book of spy movie clichés. In the finale, Hathaway flees for the border with the Chinese army in hot pursuit, while Shelby's finger hovers perilously over the all-important bomb button. It's a reasonably taut climax, but comes too late in the day to save the film as a whole. In summary, The Chairman has a few highlights but generally speaking it's one of those films that could have, and should have, been better!

Gregory Peck is a scientist. He is sent on a mysterious mission to China, where it turns out a scientist has developed an amazingly beneficial enzyme, and thinks Peck is the only man who can work out how to duplicate it for mass production, cure all known diseases, etc. Peck and said scientist are idealists who want to share it with the world, while the US and Chinese governments just want it for themselves. And, to make the whole thing more credible, Peck is equipped with a micro-transmitter in his brain which monitors his physical status and bugs his every conversation, including the one he has after playing table tennis with Chairman Mao.It sounds silly, and, frankly, it is, but the espionage and the attempts to detect it are fairly tense, and Gregory Peck indulges in a fair number of good old humanitarian rants which suggest that Chinese totalitarianism and US militarism aren't necessarily wonderful things either.I rather enjoyed it.